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Google News To Release With WordPress

December 29th, 2008 by Frank • WordPress Hacks • 17 Comments

Google News can be a coveted platform. But Google needs for the aggregation a special format - News Sitemap.

Basically you can create this format in two ways with WordPress. Both solutions will be presented here. I will talk about the second example more in detail, because I believe it shows very nicely how to use content from WordPress outside your blog.

1. The first way is to create a sitemap, similar to a feed in WordPress. This has several advantages for the administration in WordPress.
   How to create a feed, I have in the tutorial „WordPress Feed for Drafts“ shown. You can download this solution as a plugin and simple use Google News-Sitemap.
2. A second possibility is to create a PHP file in the root directory and to write the latest posts into the appropriate format.

Include WordPress

To get the data from WordPress, you have to have access to wp-load.php, therefore I include it and can get it from the global variables of WordPress, for example the $wpdb database .
This means you can retrieve now all data from the database, which are relevant to the XML format of the Google News Sitemap.

The format

Google provides the following XML structure. I build the structure in the file, and fill it only with the last 20 News.
Backgrounds and tips from Google are on their document site.

<urlset xmlns=“http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9?
xmlns:news=“http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-news/0.9?>
	<url>
		<loc>http://www.domain.de/news/news1.html</loc>
		<news:news>
			<news:publication_date>2008-22-01T00:29:19+01:00</news:publication_date>
			<news:keywords>key1, key2, key3</news:keywords>
		</news:news>
	</url>
</urlset>

The file

Below you'll find a simple solution that you can surely expand. In the SQL query is the example of a defined category. This is simply the ID of the category compared (AND wp_term_taxonomy.term_id = 7). If all content should be drawn, then it's suffice to delete this line.

<?php
require('wp-load.php');

// XML header
echo '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>' . "\n";

// urlset
echo '<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
				xmlns:news="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-news/0.9">' . "\n";

// Select posts; set limit 20
$rows = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT DISTINCT ID, post_date_gmt
                            FROM $wpdb->posts, $wpdb->term_relationships, $wpdb->term_taxonomy
                            WHERE wp_term_relationships.object_id = wp_posts.id
                            AND post_status = 'publish'
                            AND post_type = 'post'
                            AND wp_term_taxonomy.term_taxonomy_id = wp_term_relationships.term_taxonomy_id
                            AND wp_term_taxonomy.taxonomy = 'category'
                            AND wp_term_taxonomy.term_id = 7
                            ORDER BY wp_posts.post_date_gmt DESC
                            LIMIT 0, 20");

// sitemap data
// set keywords !

foreach ($rows as $row) {
	echo "\t" . '<url>' . "\n";

	echo "\t\t" . '<loc>';
	echo get_permalink($row->ID);
	echo '</loc>' . "\n";
	echo "\t\t" . '<news:news>' . "\n";
	echo "\t\t" . '<news:publication_date>';
	$thedate = substr($row->post_date_gmt, 0, 10);
	$thetime = substr($row->post_date_gmt, 11, 20);
	echo $thedate . 'T' . $thetime . 'Z';
	echo '</news:publication_date>' . "\n";
	echo "\t\t" . '<news:keywords>online, news</news:keywords>' . "\n"; // change keywords
	echo "\t\t" . '</news:news>' . "\n";
	echo "\t" . '</url>' . "\n";
}

// End urlset
echo '</urlset>';
?>

In the above syntax, the unique keywords are statically assigned. If you assign tags to a blog post, then it is advisable to use it and create there. Following addition will help.

	$tags     = wp_get_post_tags( $row->ID, array('fields' => 'all') );
	$tagcount = count($tags);
	echo "\t\t" . '<news:keywords>';
	for ($i = 1; $i < $tagcount; $i++) {
		echo $taglist  = str_replace( "'", '', str_replace( '"', '', urldecode($tags[$i]->name) ) );
		if ( $i != $tagcount-1 )
		 echo ', ';
	}
	echo '</news:keywords>' . "\n";

Use this line instead

echo "\t\t" . '<news:keywords>online, news</news:keywords>' . "\n"; // change keywords

and it will assign tags automatically, seperated by a comma.

Inclusion in Google

Once you have the above syntax as a file in the root installation and successfully tested, then you only have to ask for inclusion in Google News. There is a form available. Then just wait for an answer from Google.
To see if you are indexed, you can simple search in Google News: site:domain.com.